If there’s two things that have become a bit of a theme on this site, it’s belief in the power of collaboration and the excitement of innovation. With this in mind, we present BulbStorm, a community based site that brings the two concepts together to assist you in building yours.
The Concept
I love the concept of BulbStorm, there’s a certain entrepreneurial spirit about it. Basically, the system works like this:
- Register for free
- Join a group
- Review member submitted ideas and provide feedback
- Submit your own ideas and receive feedback
- Obtain credits by contributing to other ideas
- The more credits you collect, the more visibility your idea gets when you’re ready for it
- Protect your idea as needed
- Massage, tweak and prep your concepts for market
- When ready, greenlight and begin looking for investors
Your idea/concept will only be distributed to those you choose to distribute it to, and additional features, including Non-Disclosure Agreements, can be activated to ensure confidentiality and propriety are protected. Through the process of receiving feedback and massaging your concepts, you move closer to greenlighting the project for funding.
The Potential
With the economy in a prolonged dryspell, entrepreneurship, for those who embrace it, will prove to be a leading factor in growth and success over the next few years. There are a few limiting factors in this for most people – support and development costs. The wonderful thing about a concept like BulbStorm is it alleviates both of those items.
By leveraging the built in community, entrepreneurs can gain invaluable feedback and support, which allows them to reduce devopment costs through troubleshooting potential problems before throwing away valuable resources.
A Speedbump
Like most internet start-ups, building a committed audience is a hard thing to do. If you are like me, this is probably the first, maybe the second, time you’ve heard of BulbStorm, which begs the question: How do you build an online community from scratch when the promise of the online community is one of your biggest assets?
The same things that are the site’s greatest strengths – its community and feedback system – will also be its greatest weakness in these early days. Without the community firmly in place, BulbStorm will have a hard time delivering on the brand promise of feedback and collaboration for the would-be entrepreneur.
However, with advice, feedback, frequent-user rewards and intellectual property protection in place, BulbStorm has the tools to be a valuable tool for creative insight for entrepreneurs. Approximately 350 community members have joined to date, and if you are willing to grow with them, you could reap some major benefits.
SHARE THIS POST:
Thanks for the summary of bulbstorm! I am excited to see that you TOTALLY get it. It’s been hard at times for us to communicate our value-proposition, so I really appreciate how well you’ve done it here. You’re also right that in can be a challenge to grow a community in the beginning. So far, we’ve been pretty lucky. We just opened the site about two weeks ago and have already grown to 350. That’s not the 2MM users we want to grow to, but it at least shows that there are lots of innovative people out there who are ready to collaborate.
You mentioned our points model (WATT$), so I hope you know that we reward 50 WATT$ for each member a person invites who signs up. So, a person can invite their friends/colleagues, get their feedback, and earn the currency they need to advertise their idea. We think that can help us in creating a vibrant and incredibly innovative community. We’re also about to start some projects with large companies, that will not only allow people to give feedback on their ideas, but will also bring in some of the “big guys” that may want to buy the “little guys’” ideas.
I hope you’ll keep an eye on us and on the ideas of our community. We love feedback!
Bart Steiner, CEO, bulbstorm.com